Sociocultural & Linguistic Anthropology

A great number of our faculty share an explicit research interest in the body as an ethnographic site, as a prime locus of culture, as a resource for social action, and as a focal point for historical processes. We come to the body through a variety of research questions and intellectual trajectories, from a concern with the inheritance of Cartesian dualisms, to a focus on locality and situated practice, to an engagement with queer theory, to the pasts, presents, and futures of feminist anthropology, to a focus on dance and human movement, to an examination of selfhood, to research into cognition and agency.

Our work as a faculty includes research on processes of ethnic and national identity construction, research on transnational populations (migrant and diasporic communities), and research on transnational social phenomena (from missionaries to global capital).

Our faculty considers race as a pivotal component of their research programs. Race is no longer accepted by anthropologists as a biologically determined feature but rather one that is socially created, imposed and contested. Race is approached through faculty research on the roles played by the state in the continuing production, imposition and performance of racialized identities as well as the construction of racialized counter-narratives by peoples in various spaces.

Transnational and global economic developments have renewed a long standing interest within anthropology in the organization of work and its articulation to social reproduction, cultural practices, and local and national politics.Our faculty has produced work that has addressed these issues on a variety of levels.

The fuzzy and fertile boundaries between history and anthropology, between past and present, and between memory and experience, are indispensable reference points and constant resources for innovation for anthropology. Our work as a faculty spans historical anthropological studies of colonial situations, missionary encounters, and the anthropology of modernity, close ethnographic examinations of memory practices, along with efforts to address the intellectual and practical history of our own discipline.

Our faculty expertise in linguistic anthropology engages research on languages and language use in a rich variety of sociocultural contexts, with a shared commitment to understanding discourse as semiotic processes constitutive of social life. Our work as a faculty spans research on political and human rights discourses; signed languages and co-expressive talk/gesture; language endangerment and revitalization; language, gender and sexuality; language and identity; communication and digital media, discourses of race and racisms, diaspora construction; narrative and migration. Our courses include training in a broad range of methods in linguistic anthropology applicable to these diverse research topics. 

A number of our research and teaching interests converge around the imbricated themes of religion and modernity: as analytic frames for examining cultural difference and its negotiation through history, as key diacritics of our contemporary moment, and as questions that cut across a long disciplinary genealogy. This nexus is an especially productive one for anthropology today as the perpetuation and proliferation of religious identities and practices, often in complex relation with the phenomena of globalization, compel new understandings of culture and new approaches to ethnography, including in highly contested zones. As a faculty, we address these issues through a wide range of cases and a mix of particularist and comparative perspectives.

Regionally, UIUC has a strong focus on Latin America and the Caribbean, with the research of Rosas focused on Mexico and the US-Mexican border area (Nogales, Sonora), Moodie on emergent subjectivities in the post-conflict transitions in Central America (particularly El Salvador), and more recently in Cuba, Orta on Aymara communities and foreign missionaries in highland Bolivia, and Dominguez on the French, English, and Spanish-Speaking Caribbean. (See also the archeological work of Silverman in Peru as well Lucero’s archaeological analysis of Mayan political systems and water management in Belize.)

The department also boasts a number of faculty engaged in research with North American communities, including Davis' and Farnell's work with Native North Americans, Desmond’s work on culture and feminist theory, popular culture, and media and live performance in the U.S. and beyond, on the transnational study of the U.S. and on human-animal relations, Rosas’s work in the Midwest and on the Borderlands, Dominguez’s work in Louisiana and on transnational U.S. studies. In addition, Harrison's and Smalls' research focuses on the African diaspora as well as transnational studies. (See also the archeological work of Pauketat and Fennell). Affiliated faculty in other departments offer additional anthropological expertise in regional foci such as Latino/a Studies and Asian American Studies.

Another notable area of research strength is both the anthropology of Europe, reflected in the research of Greenberg in Post-Soviet Europe, and Dominguez’s work in the Middle East. In East Asia, Martin conducts research on China.

We invite you to contact the Graduate Studies Program Coordinator, Director, and affiliated faculty and staff for more information on Sociocultural & Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Students interested in applying for admission to our graduate program can also consult our online graduate admissions information.

Dr. Krystal Smalls, Interim Director of Graduate Studies Program 
Department of Anthropology
University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign
109 Davenport Hall (MC‐148)
607 Mathews Avenue
Urbana, IL 61801
Phone: Not Available
Email: ksmalls@illinois.edu 

Ms. Joyce Dowell, Graduate Studies Program Coordinator
Department of Anthropology
University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign
109F Davenport Hall (MC‐148)
607 Mathews Ave.
Urbana, IL 61801
Phone: (217)-300-9167
Email: joyce14@illinois.edu